Time for whales, dusky dolphins and seals!<\/p>\n
We arrived in the Kaikoura region on Monday late afternoon – after starting around 10:00am. If anyone can turn a two-hour drive into a whole day affair, it’s us.<\/p>\n
State Highway one took us all the way from Picton to Kaikoura, with the last part we drove right along the coast. And guess what we saw – seals! Hundreds and hundreds of them. At one time we walked along an out cropping of rocks and were about ten feet away from the seals (the seals were below us and couldn’t jump up to the rocks where we were). We also learned that the seals come out of the water\/off the rocks at nighttime to sleep – there was one already cuddled in the long grass at one of the sites we stopped at. It’s still so weird to us that through all the miles and miles of coastline that we drove along – not a single house, condo development, mall, hotel, nothing. It’s all left as natural land. Now some of it would have a pasture here or there, but not much.<\/p>\n
I think we learned one reason why when we went to The Point Sheep Shearing Show to see the sheep shearing. Our host and Peter explained that each sheep would only get $18 a year for their wool – and he had the Drysdale Sheep that have really long hair (long and straight, not short and curly – that is a different breed). You could understand why so many sheep stations have gone out of business.<\/p>\n
We got to met Peter’s dog, Jed, a big male sheep – Ram Man, blackie (did you know you usually only get one black sheep out of a thousand births?), and the sheep that he sheared – in 4.5 minutes. Which was slow, he said so that we could really see it. <\/p>\n
We got to pet the sheep after it was sheared to feel the lanolin oil, touch all the equipment (those shears are HEAVY), feel the rams horns, see how the farmer packs the wool into bales, learn a whole host of facts and we we all got a sample of the sheep wool. It was really soft. Plus his sheep weren’t dirty, so it was clean without any washing.<\/p>\n
Our host was a good performer without being over-the-top or cheesy. His wife’s family used to own the whole peninsula of land and have between 3-5,000 sheep. Now they only have 300 sheep and a small portion of the land – just enough to do the two shows a day. <\/p>\n
The tip of the peninsula is now a department of conservation reserve to protect the seal colony that lives there. We tried to go see it – but it was a bit too windy and rainy. At some points it almost blew Chayton over. Which is why we ended up at the sheep station. We were supposed to go out on the boat to see the whales, but with the weather so bad we rebooked for Wednesday.<\/p>\n
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